Corpsman in anguish, 1967, © Catherine Leroy

By Liv Stecker

She stood five feet tall, but only with her boots on. She was one of only two female journalists covering the war in Vietnam (the other, Dickie Chappelle, was killed by a grenade in 1965) , and the diminutive French girl was the last thing you’d expect to see parachuting in with American troops, but the 90 pound photographer became the only known accredited photojournalist to accomplish this mission, and with it, capture some of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War that the world would ever see.

Catherine Leroy was raised in a convent in Paris, France, where a boyfriend taught her how to skydive as a teenager. She was enthralled with photojournalism, and at the age of 21 (her age was never confirmed), she bought a one way ticket to Saigon and landed in the war zone with only a few dollars and her small Leica M2 camera in hand. Her goal was to “give war a human face”. On the flight from Paris, she met someone who introduced her to Life magazine photojournalist Charles Bonnay, who helped her get the press credentials she lacked and within days she was on her way to the front lines.

Catherine Leroy, 1967

A licensed parachutist, Leroy jumped with the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade into combat during Operation Junction City in February of 1967. It was in this action, the battle for Hill 881, that Leroy photographed U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike as he rushed to the aid of a fallen comrade. “Corpsman in anguish” is the third frame of a series that Leroy shot, capturing the unimaginable grief of war. Later, in an interview for the documentary “The Hill Fights”, Wike recounted the moment that Leroy photographed.

“I know there was chaos going on around me, but there was no sound,” he says. “...I knew he didn’t have a chance, but I still got p-----d off when he died.” Leroy describes the aftermath as the corpsman “lost in this nightmare landscape” grabbed the fallen marine’s M16 and charged a Viet bunker alone in a hail of obscenities. The fallen marine was a man called “Rock”, a New Yorker from Puerto Rico. Earlier that day he had told Wike that he only had 60 days left “in country” - his deployment in Vietnam.

Two weeks later, Leroy was wounded near the demilitarized zone where she was embedded with a Marine unit. The next year, the photojournalist was captured by the North Vietnamese Army during the TET Offensive, along with another French journalist. Somehow, the blonde girl talked them into releasing them and before they left their captors she interviewed them and took photographs for a story in Life magazine which she wrote. Leroy kept in contact with Wike over the years. The Navy veteran came home and struggled through readjusting to civilian life as an icon of an unpopular war and the death it brought.

Along with the American Soldiers lost in countless battles across the globe, the warriors who come home to continue fighting the demons they have encountered are still here among us. Veterans like Wike who have lost more in a small window of time than many of us lose over a lifetime are very much alive and still at war against less obvious enemies. Rarely have civilian audiences been given the intimate glimpse of war that Leroy provided. What the photographer captured in the face of Wilke on the hill in Vietnam is as close to the horror of war as any of us will ever come, and in this, Leroy accomplished her mission. She gave war a face, and it was the face of an American Soldier.

U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike, Catherine Leroy